Wine.com Is Going Out With an Auction Bang
In a grand farewell toast to the heady days of the dot-com boom, nearly 1 million bottles from the cellars of defunct Wine.com will be sold next week in what’s billed as the largest wine auction ever.
Included in the $10-million cache: Bottles of 1945 Chateau Latour for $5,500 a pop as well as $5.78 bottles of 1999 Malbec from Argentina. The range and sheer number of wines on the block have made the sale the event of the year in Napa Valley, attracting private collectors, posh hotels and discount liquor chains.
The auction--which will take place in a hangar at the Napa Valley Airport and online Sept. 15 and 16--has received inquiries from wine buffs as far away as France, Indonesia and Australia, said Nuri Otus, chief executive of Realm Connect Corp., which runs AuctioNet, the company hired to liquidate Wine.com’s inventory.
“This, by a factor of 10, is the largest auction we’ve ever seen, not only value but size,” said John Hinman, a San Francisco beverage law attorney who helped orchestrate the sale.
Wine.com launched with the backing of big-name investors such as Amazon.com Inc., New York Times Co. and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. It went out of business in March after running into a thicket of regulations governing the sale of alcohol across state lines.
The name Wine.com--once valued at more than $1 million--and the company’s customer list were sold to rival EVineyard Inc. in April for $10 million. But because EVineyard does not hold its own inventory, Wine.com’s bottles went to its creditor, Sand Hill Capital, which owns stock in EVineyard.
“We actually still believe in the Internet wine business,” Sand Hill Capital President and CEO William Del Biaggio said.
Because the scale of the sale is unprecedented, winemakers with a large number of bottles in Wine.com’s inventory were offered the opportunity to buy back their stock in advance of the public auction to avoid driving down retail prices. Hinman said he did not know how many of the vineyards bought back wine.
Unlike previous dot-com auctions featuring fancy chairs and powerful computers, the Wine.com affair has attracted a wider and much different audience. Among the frequently asked questions posted on the auction’s Web site are, “Will the Napa Valley Airport accommodate my Gulfstream 5?”
The answer is yes, but bigger planes are not allowed.
“This is going to be a first-class affair,” Otus said, explaining that between the live auction and the online bidding at https://www.auctionet.com, hundreds of thousands of bidders might be involved. The large crowds were part of the reason for holding the event in an airplane hangar.
But because the hangar provides a poor climate for the wine, bottles will be stored somewhere else and shipped to winning bidders. State law limits the amount of wine individual buyers can purchase to 20 cases per transaction. Liquor retailers and restaurant buyers can purchase more.
Clay Gregory, general manager of Robert Mondavi Winery in Napa Valley, advised buyers to know what they want before they arrive and to not be seduced by the big-name, high-priced wines, most of which will be snatched up by collectors.
“No mater what their interest in wine is, they would be well-served to look at this list because it covers such a wide gamut,” Gregory said.
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Prices That Can Make You “Wine”
Some of the wines offered at Wine.com’s auction. Prices are “estimated auction value.”
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Vintage Wine No. of bottles Price 1982 Chateau Mouton Rothschild, Pauillac, France 12 bottles $8,300 1945 Chateau D’Yquem, Sauternes Premier Grand Cru, France 1 bottle $2,200 1945 Chateau Latour, Pauillac (Magnum), Bordeaux 1 bottle $5,500 1982 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, Pauillac, France 1 bottle $8,300 1921 Chateau D’Yquem, Sauternes Premier Grand Cru, France 1 bottle $3,900
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